Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint
According to Moderna Museet the photographer is unknown, Public domain

The pioneer of abstract art.

Hilma af Klint painted abstract pictures from 1906, guided by spiritual ideas. She did not want the works shown until twenty years after her death, and she became world-famous only in the 21st century.

Hilma af Klint was born in 1862 at Karlberg Palace in Solna, where her father was a naval officer and teacher at the military academy. The family had a strong interest in mathematics and nautical chart-making. She studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1882–1887 and was one of relatively few women at the time to receive a full artistic training.

After her studies she supported herself as a respected landscape and portrait painter. She also made precise botanical drawings and illustrations for the Veterinary Institute. At the same time she was deeply involved in spiritualism and theosophy. From 1896 she met regularly with four other women in a group that called itself The Five. They held séances and made automatic drawings, in which the hand was allowed to move without conscious control.

In 1906 she began what she understood as a commission from spiritual beings: The Paintings for the Temple. By 1915 she had created 193 works in the series. They include The Ten Largest of 1907, huge canvases more than three metres tall that depict the ages of human life with spirals, flower shapes, letters and clear colours. She worked on the floor, painting in tempera on paper that was then mounted on canvas.

The theosophist Rudolf Steiner saw her paintings in 1908 but was doubtful about them. She later joined his anthroposophical movement. In her last decades she painted smaller formats and watercolours. She died in 1944 after a traffic accident in Djursholm. In her will she stipulated that the abstract works were not to be shown until twenty years after her death. She left more than a thousand works and thousands of pages of notes.

Her abstract art became known to a wider public only through the exhibition at Moderna Museet in 2013. The exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018–2019 became one of the museum’s most visited ever. Whether she should be called the first abstract artist is still debated, since she herself did not see the works as art in the usual sense but as spiritual messages. But her pictures have forced a rewriting of the history of early abstract art.